Connecting to a former chatroom

Can anyone help me ???

I am brand new to my MacBook Pro (3 days). It works fine, except I cannot connect to a group of chatrooms that I used to access on my Acer laptop with Windows 7. The name of the group of chatrooms is "Starchat" (@ Starchat.net).

I would appreciate anyone's detailed advice as how to connect to Starchat---it was a Java group of chatrooms.

Thank you,

RxTim

PS: I was on Apple tech support phone for over 5 hours trying to get this answered---no one could help.

I don't know if I can help you more than Apple did, but the first step I would think is to make sure you are bang-up-to-date with Java (SE 7 update 17).

I tested starchat.net with both Safari (6.0.3) and Firefox (19.0.2). Safari would of course go to the page, but would not open a chatroom. I later discovered that this was because jChat's digital signature/certification has expired.

In Firefox, everything worked fine after a pair of security warnings, including that the program (a) had an expired certificate and (b) had unsafe components that had to be disabled.

To me this is a HUGE MINUS for Firefox and jChat both and I would recommend you seek some alternative method (such as a dedicated IRC client) of accessing the space so that you don't put yourself at risk.

Macs are normally WAAAAAAAY (I could go on) more secure than Windows PCs but in the case of the Java plug-in, *all bets are off* and a number of serious threats are in use right now for unwary Java users, with new exploits coming to light fairly often of late.

See if Starchat will work with a dedicated Mac IRC program such as Colloquy (many other options available, but this one is supported and free).